The Knowledge-Creating Company

Senior managers give voice to a company’s future by articulating metaphors, symbols, and concepts that orient the knowledge-creating activities of employees. They do this by asking the questions, What are we trying to learn? What do we need to know? Where should we be going? Who are we? If the job of frontline employees is to know “what is,” then the job of senior executives is to know “what ought to be.” Or in the words of Hiroshi Honma, senior researcher at Honda: “Senior managers are romantics who go in quest of the ideal.”